Addiction: The disease that tears families apart

Los Angeles County Sheriff's officers stand outside an apartment building where Scott Sterling, the son of the Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, lived in Malibu on Wednesday, Jan.2,2012. Scott Sterling was found dead of an apparent drug overdose at his Malibu home, authorities said Wednesday. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Editor’s Note: Three families in the area shared with reporter Chelsea Reyher the story of their child’s addiction and their personal struggle with the disease. Their words are real, but for the sake of their privacy they are referred to under aliases – the Wilson, Smith and Jones families.

Anne Wilson’s daughter had been smoking marijuana since adolescence, went through the drug court as a young adult and eventually developed a heroin addiction.

But she also graduated from college with honors and had a good marketing job for two years — until her addiction got so out of hand that she was fired.

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“Looking back on it, there were lots of times when she was AWOL. She wouldn’t show up for family birthday parties, but she always had an excuse,” said Wilson.

Wilson called herself a “world class enabler,” but with the help of her son and daughter-in-law, Wilson took her daughter to an inpatient rehab after she was fired.

“Four-and-a-half years ago, when she came out of her first rehab, that was the point when I really started doing what I should have been doing all along.”

Wilson eventually stopped financially supporting her daughter and wouldn’t communicate with her unless she was clean and in recovery.

“Anything you would normally do to help a healthy child is just enabling a child who’s an addict. So it’s counter-intuitive to everything you’ve learned as a parent,” said Harry Smith, whose son is an addict. “You think you’re protecting them, clearing away hurdles, helping them to stay on the straight and narrow path … whether it’s paying fines and parking tickets, driving them to court cases to make sure they don’t miss their court cases, making car payments, bailing them out of situations.”

But that only makes it easier for the addict to keep using, he said.

Addiction is known as a family disease because family members develop symptoms of their own and get just as sick as the addicts themselves.

“Often the family is divided. The addict creates chaos in the family. They will often pit one family member against another,” said Sandra Lockhart, a facilitator in Chester County for the Pennsylvania Recovery Organization — Achieving Community Together, or PRO-ACT, a family education program. Family members sometimes take on the persona of the addicted person, she said, which was true for Smith.

“I was addicted to my addicted son,” said Harry Smith. “My frame of mind kind of went up and down as his addiction got worse or got a little bit better. The worse his addiction got the more anxiety I felt, the more depressed I would get.”

Smith’s wife, Mary, said as a parent, she felt like she should be able to do something, but the more she did the worse it got. It was the feeling of hopelessness that fed her depression.

And without the education on addiction, Sue and Joe Jones struggled with determining an addiction from normal adolescent experimentation.

“When I definitely knew it was a problem was the night he sat here and said ‘I need to smoke and I can’t not,’” said Sue Jones of her son. “I didn’t really understand the scope of it until he started getting help and we started getting educated.”

All three families went to a few education programs as a part of their child’s rehab. And while not connected with a rehab facility, the PRO-ACT family education program has three sessions: understanding addiction, the impact it has on the family, and developing a support network. But it wasn’t easy for the families to digest.

“It took us quite a few rehabs for us to realize that this problem is going to be around for all of his life,” said Harry Smith. “It’s got nothing to do with social circumstances or family surroundings — that I think is the hardest thing to actually believe because you want to believe that this horrible disease that they’re telling you about does not apply to your own kid.”

Beyond initial education, families are encouraged to continue their recovery. Nar-anon and al-anon meetings are an opportunity for family and friends to share their story and listen to others’ experiences. And there are other support groups that don’t necessarily follow the same structure but are another avenue for recovery.

“For years I’ve been saying I just want to find a group of fathers to see what they’ve done, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked and get a little bit of strength from people who are going through the same thing,” said Harry Smith, who found a support group and goes every week.

When Anne Wilson started going to meetings, she found a sponsor and attributes much of her recovery to the support she got from him.

“Had it not been for him as a recovery person saying to me, ‘don’t do this,’ really helping me and guiding me, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” Wilson said. Because without that support, “it’s just too hard to hang up on your kid when they’re calling from jail. And it’s too hard to get to the point where you say I don’t care if you don’t have any shoes that aren’t flip flops, I don’t care if your tooth hurts, I don’t care that you haven’t had a haircut.”

But the addicts’ recovery has to be their own, and they have to face the consequences of their actions. A family member’s recovery involves education, support and taking care of themselves – in whatever avenue works best for them.

“Knowing that I couldn’t do anything that would help him at all, I decided to help other people because I felt like I needed to do something for someone,” said Mary Smith. She went to Guatemala with Habitat for Humanity and started going to Church again. “Now I feel like I have other things that I can grab on to and people that I can talk to.”